// On :Wednesday, 9 April 2014
Author: Hiroaki Samura
Pages: 96
Release date: 21/12/2006
Genres: forced, torture, guro, bondage, monster, anal, scat, body modification, constraint, extreme insertion, femdom, humiliation, inflation, insect
Translated: yes
Rating:
Earlier today, while chosing what to review, I was wondering what qualifies something as hentai. It's certainly not the mere presence of sex and even less the simple nudity, or many of the common mangas for an adult audience would be considered hentai (with extreme annoyance of the prudish readers, I'm sure). Perhaps the focus on the erotic aspects is the discriminant, but some of the best hentai manga and doujin have good stories that go beyond that, or doesn't even involve sex. Then it occurred to me that hentai is less a genre and more a simple convention, useful for idiotic people to shame and avoid some topics, and for the others to get easy access to the good stuff. So, even not nude drawings could be considered hentai? In my opinion yes, with the right innuendo and mood, without even showing explicit contents a story could be considered erotic and therefore hentai. I'm obviously talking about the use of the term in western countries, given that in Japan there are completely different conventions. This just to say that the derogatory shade of the term couldn't be more volatile.
Does this argument have something to do with today review? Yes and no. Hiroaki Samura is a great artist well known for his masterwork Blade of the Immortal, a gruesome and superb story of a samurai trying to regain his mortality (yup, that's not a typo), peculiar for the extremely realistic art style of the whole opera. As you can learn from the afterwords in this very book is that Samura, at some point in his career, was obsessed by the desire to boast the title of torture artist; if this artbook is a monument to that dream is for posterity to judge.
What we've got here is an amazing piece of art as Samura's drawing skills leave me speechless. Every illustrations stands for itself as there's obviously no plot, but there are a couple of extremely short written stories and you can sometimes see the progression of a scene between two or three pages. I must warn you that (especially close to the end) contents tend to get rather graphic, switching from torture to explicit gore without warning, but if you can stand hardcore contents -not much worse of what you can see in common mangas like Blade of the Immortal- you should look at this just for its artistic value.
So, is this hentai or not? If yes, even the guro it contains? Actually, I could see this work more accepted outside as a not erotic artbook, since the erotic feeling would make it feel morbid and -for someone- disturbing. Nevertheless there's a lot of people (well, at least I'm sure about one) recognizing and enjoying even the sexual aspects of this masterpiece.
